Colby Quarterly Colby Quarterly

Volume 5 Issue 6 June Article 6

June 1960

Aldous Huxley, Vernon Lee and the Genius Loci Aldous Huxley, Vernon Lee and the Genius Loci

Richard Cary

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, series 5, no.6, June 1960, p.128-140

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128 Colby Library Quarterly

ALDOUS HUXLEY, VERNON LEE AND THEGENIUS LOCI

By RICHARD CARY

ONCE every five years the American Academy of Arts andLetters presents its Award of Merit for the Novel "in recog­

nition of a novelist's entire corpus of work." In 1959 it selectedAldous Huxley for the honor, thus bringing to semi-officialculmination an opinion long harbored by the literate readingpublic. To those who have read the cited succession of novels(Crome Yellow, 1921, to The Genius and the Goddess, 1955)there remains no doubt that he has "done the best work in ourtime in ... the novel of ideas." But this is to isolate a singlefacet of his irradiant output. For almost forty-five years Huxleyhas emitted a profuse and provocative flow of poems, essays andfiction of extraordinary subject range. The categories in his re­cent Collected Essays are indicative: nature, travel, love, sexand physical beauty, literature, painting, music, taste and style,history, politics, psychology, sense and psyche, way of life. Inshort, the whole spectrum of human experience.

Awed by the illimitability of Huxley's scope, V. S. Pritchettwas moved to remark, "If the electronic brain could develop thetemperament of the artist, it would become Aldous Huxley."He also characterized him as "a mellifluous encyclopaedia," aman who "gave the impression [of knowing] the Britannica byheart." Pritchett was secure in his intuition. Fronl the begin­ning, Huxley was hard put to resist "the temptation to readpromiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose." Duringearlier years of extensive travel, his inveterate companion wasat least one volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from whichhe gleaned an "almost countless number of curious and im­probable facts." His interim biographer John Atkins says with­out qualification that "Nothing was beneath his interest." Thebeauty of Huxley's amplitude, however, is its unpedantic qual­ity. In this he resembles Emberlin, his arcane sonneteer in"Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers," - a person"immensely erudite, but in a wholly unencyclopaedic way."

Thirty-five years ago, Huxley had not the stature he enjoystoday but he was far from unknown. By 1925 he had published

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Colby Library Quarterly 129five volumes of poetry, three novels, three collections each ofessays and short stories, and was busily constructing three morebooks which were to appear in 1926. Crome Yellow, MortalCoils, Antic Hay, and Young Archimedes had established himas a portent in prose fiction, yet the essay - particularly thetravel essay - was a matter of capital concern to him at thistime. Three of the four sections in A long the Road (1925) aretitled: "Travel in General," "Places," "By the Way." It isunremarkable, then, that he should pick up and read with ab­sorption Vernon Lee's assembled po·rtraits of places, TheGolden Keys (1925). On May 26 of that year, from 15 Via S.Margherita a Montici, Firenze, Huxley sent her this coruscantletter (now in the Colby College Library):

Dear Miss Paget.

I have been savouring the Golden Keys 1 - if one can be said to savoura key - at leisure & with the keenest enjoyment. I tend to like bestthe papers about the places I know myself - Bologna & that beautifulBologna road (where we were once held up for a night, in arctic cold,by the snow) and that exquisite Villa Gori at Siena 2 (which it was onlythe lack of drains & water that prevented us once from actually livingin) . They recall old delights and make one observe significant detailswhich I had not noticed or insufficiently appreciated.From the known I proceed with confidence to the unknown, feeling sure

1 Colby College's The Golden Keys and Other Essays on the Genius Loci(John Lane, London: 1925) was Miss Paget's personal copy. Across thefront of the olive green dust cover is scrawled V Paget, brusquely under­lined. On the first endleaf she wrote Oasa, for Casa Paget, the family home.On page 3 she scored elmS' and penciled planes in the margin; on page 4 sheslashed n in town and indicated er; on page 7 she lined out the second ele­ment of rose-oolorea and substituted geranium.l· on page 23 the adjectivefrescoed is shifted to modify va8es instead of hedges. Then, as perhapsfatigue or ennui set in, she did not even trouble to cut open at the foreedge two pairs of pages containing half titles of essays. Not until page 237does further emendation of text occur; there she added n to Gipfel in theepigraph to "At the Chalet." In archaeological conspiracy with time anddamp, a now absent metal paper clip has spread its immortal brown stainalong the top margin of the last half dozen pages.2 In The Golden KeyS', Chapter VI is "The Old Bologna Road," Chapter VII,"Dusky Many-Towered Bologna," and Chapter XXII, "The Woods AroundSiena." Miss Paget knew the magic of euphony and made the most of itin describing "the road from Bologna to Florence by Pietramala andLoiano." It was Edith Wharton, "the American novelist who has so great aknowledge of Italian gardens," who introduced her to the Villa Gori out­side Porta Ovile. Miss Paget's depiction of the Seven Churches round SanStefano, with "barrocco Gesu Morto8 shelved where you expect only brokenchairs and derelict besoms," and the tunnels of clipped ilex at Siena, soremindful of Laocoon's writhing captors, were bound to clutch at IIuxley'sgothic sensibility.

During 1923-1925 Huxley lived for the most part in Italy. In Alongthe Road (also published in London, 1925), he recorded his own impressionsof this region in "The Palto at Siena" and "A Night at Pletramala."

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130 Colby Library Quarterlythat, when I come to visit Vezelay & Semur & Wolframsdorf,3 I shallfind that I know them already - know the essential and artistically im­portant things about them - from your book.How much I like, too, your generalizations about the Genius Loci! Onemay be born a worshipper of more spectacular deities - from Jehovahto D. H. Lawrence's Dark God,4 from Dionysus to the object of Boe­hme's ecstasies - one may be born but it is useless to try to makeoneself, consciously, a worshipper at such shrines. For most of us, Ifancy, Wordsworth's Natural Pieties 5 are the most decent & satisfactorything. Of the theory & practice of the Natural Pieties your books are amost delicate and beautiful exposition.I am looking forward with faith, hope & patience to the end of thisabominable weather. When it comes, I shall venture to propose myselfagain, one afternoon. And if it doesn't come - which seems, after all,likely enough - well, I shall do the same.

Yours very sincerely,Aldous Huxley.

To a request for permission to print this letter, Huxley as­sented graciously on a 3 x 4 engraved informal correspondencecard. The meticulous mind picked out a flaw in the typ'ed tran­script, recalling precisely what he had written over thirty-fouryears ago. (One suffers no qualms on this point. His handwrit­ing is ~ of 1% more legible than Miss Paget's, which is a re­lentless cacograph.) To inquiries about where and when hefirst nlet Miss Paget, and his impression of her as a personality,3 Vezelay appealed to Miss Paget on three counts: its air of being "aminiature Siena," the great narthex of the Church of the Magdalen, and its"longings for everything which reality denies." The pellucid blue sky, theblack-aproned children, and the ancient billiard table of M. du Chateletcaught her eye in Semur-en-Auxois, but it must have been the anomalousmytho-Christian synthesis that intrigued Huxley: the bunches of freshlyharvested grapes adorning statues of the Virgin and the Christ Child. Thepseudo-Palladian front and pastiche interior of Schloss Wolframsdorf wouldhave beckoned any real amateur of the road.4 Some critics purport to see marked Laurentian influences in Huxley'sthinking. Huxley maintained a long and satisfactory friendship with Law­rence, edited a volume of his letters, and is said to have re-created him asMark Rampion in Point Counter Pomt.5 The phrase is transcribed from "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold."At this point in his career Huxley was quoting Wordsworth with notablefrequency. In his review, "A Wordsworth Anthology," he had said: "Broughtup as -children in the Wordsworthian tradition, we were taught to believethat a Sunday walk among the hills was somehow equivalent to church­going; the First Lesson was to be read among the clouds, the Second in theprimroses; the birds and the running waters sang hymns, and the whole bluelandscape preached a sermon 'of moral evil and of good'." [See Words­worth's "The Tables Turned," stanza 6.]

But Huxley was already altering his faith. In Those Barren LeavcB, anovel published in the same year he wrote this letter, he could let one of hischaracters disparage "old William's mild pantheism." And not much later,in "Wordsworth in the Tropics," he proclaimed the elder poet's decline from"a natural aesthete ... into a moralist, a thinker," adding glumly, "Theangels triumphed. Alas!"

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Colby Library Quarterly 131he responded expeditiously, this time on an 81;2 x 11 sheet froma three-ring loose-leaf notebook:

Dear Professor Cary,

It was, if I remember rightly, during World War I that I first met MissPaget - at Gorsington, the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, near Ox­ford. Later, when my first wife & I were living at Florence, I saw herfairly often and used always to enjoy her conversation. She had readeverything in most European languages; but her talk was not merelyerudite, it was extremely witty. One of my greatest pleasures was tolisten to her talking in Italian, which she spoke with the kind of literaryperfection which can only be achieved by a foreigner who has completelymastered the language but still speaks it from the outside, so to say, asan artist consciously manipulating his medium.

Yours sincerely,Aldous Huxley.

Huxley had every reason to admire Vernon Lee, mentally andtemperamentally. They have much in common in several areas;the art of conversation, for one. Atkins avers that Huxley could"talk fluently about everything under the sun," and Osbert Sit­well lists as one of his myriad topics "the elaborate love-makingof lepidoptera." A reporter of the London Times testified toLee's agility with this compliment supreme: "She could holdher own with such a nlaster of good talk as Whistler" - equallyin Italian and French as in English.

Comparable, also, are they in the matter of literary fecundity.Against some fifty volumes published over the span of forty-fouryears by Huxley, Lee can equate forty-three titles (some in twoor three volumes) in fifty-two years. Both have formidablechecklists of app'earances in newspapers and periodicals: manyof his earlier pieces originated in his column "Marginalia" in theAthenaeum, while she was represented almost every week in theWestminster Gazette. As to versatility, Vernon Lee wrote onsimilar and no fewer categories than those noted above forHuxley. This affinity of interests brought about a diverting con­currence of titles. Thus, Lee's Limbo (1897) is matched byHuxley's Limbo (1920), her Music and Its Lovers (1932) byhis Music at Night (1931), Genius Loci (1899) by The Geniusand the Goddess (1955). There is of course no conscious lar­ceny of methods or approach here. Huxley's Limbo, for in­stance, is a collection of short fiction; Lee's a bouquet of essays..

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132 Colby Library QuarterlyThey shared enthusiasm in psychology, esthetics, pacifism­

the parallel could be extended out of hand. But to revert to1925 and the gist of Huxley's letter to Miss Paget, they wereincontestably devotees of travel and accomplished essayists.David Daiches has said that even in his novels Huxley's "realgenius is as an essayist," avouching Huxley's own statement that"following Montaigne, I have tried to make the best of all theessay's three worlds." Along the Road (1925), subtitled Notesand Essays of a Tourist, was his first accumulation in this genre.Jesting Pilate, the Diary of a Journey, followed the next year.

By 1925, Vernon Lee had compiled no less than seven booksof travel essays: l.Jimbo and Other Essays (1897), Genius Loci,Notes on Places (1899), The Enchanted Woods, and OtherEssays on the Genius of Places (1905), The Spirit of Rome,Leaves From a Diary (1906), The Sentimental Traveller, Noteson Places (1908), The Tower of the Mirrors, and Other Essayson the Spirit of Places (1914), The Golden Keys and OtherEssays on the Genius Loci (1925). It is to be noted that onlythe first gives no positive sign that she is dealing with the actu­alities of locale.

The essays in these volumes were largely extracted from hersteady contributions to the Westminster Gazette. In style, toneand depth they are far superior to what one expects from news­paper illuminati. Here is evidenced a taut but delicate intelli­gence, raising scores of prose vignettes above platitude withillusive poetic charm. The language is apt, the allusions fronlart and literature abundant, the philosophy forceful but not dis­agreeable. Her contemporaries were nothing if not impressed.They ranked her with such princelings as Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt,Emerson, Sterne, Stevenson, Addison, Steele and Henry James,predicting that her slim but solid essays would "echo like faintspinet-notes down the corridors of time."

Her hypothetical genius loci did not spring full-blown fromthe fore edge of her first book on travel. Limbo (1897) re­veals only casually the substantial image which evolves Proteus­like in succeeding volumes. "The Lie of the Land" merely sug­gests qualities which will figure importantly in Lee's later in­dividuation of the idea. Her ecstatic discovery is basically phys­ical to begin with. "It is extraordinary how flIuch of my soul

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Colby Library Quarterly 133seems to cling to certain peculiarities of what I have called lieof the land, undulations, bends of rivers, straightenings andsnakings of road." This she quickly allies with the subcon­scious: "How much of one's past life, sensations, hopes, wishes,words, has got entangled in the little fanliliar sprigs, grassesand moss." Then with the mystic: "The landscape one actuallysees with the eyes of the body and the eyes of the spirit - thelandscape you cannot describe." Finally, she imputes to it anevocative magic: "The power of outdoor things ... can makeone live for a moment in places which have never existed savein the fancy." But she does not, herein, endow this mysteriousforce with a name of its own.

Two years thence, the inchoate concept had acquired defini­tion and an appellation.6 In the introduction to Genius Loci(1899), Lee summed up her occult formulation with a no­nonsense air:

Genius Loci. A divinity, certainly great or small as the case may be,and deserving of some silent worship. But, for mercy's sake, not a per­sonification; not a man or woman with mural crown and attributes, anddetestable definite history, like the dreadful ladies who sit round thePlace de la Concorde. To think of a place or a country in human shapeis, for all the practice of the rhetoricians, not to think of it at all. No,no. The Genius Loci, like all worthy divinities, is of the substance ofour heart and mind, a spiritual reality. And as for visible embodiment,why that is the place itself, or the country; and the features and speechare the lie of the land, pitch of the streets, sound of bells or of weirs;above all, perhaps, that strangely impressive combination, noted by Vir­gil, of "rivers washing round old city walls.". . . Although what I call Genius Loci can never be personified, wemay yet feel him nearer and more potent, in some individual monumentor feature of the landscape. He is immanent very often, and subduingour hearts most deeply, at a given turn of a road; or a path cut in ter­races in a hillside, with view of great distant mountains; or, again, in achurch like Classe, near Ravenna; most of all, perhaps, in the meeting­place of streams, or the mouth of a river, both of which draw our feetand thoughts time after time, we know not why or wherefore. Thegenius of places lurks there; or, more strictly, he is it.

6 Here and hereafter, Lee or her publishers were consistently inconsistentwith the rendition of that name - sometimes capitalized, sometimes italicized,sometimes neither, sometimes both, within the same essay. IPor the geniusloci Lee created numerous agnomens (the spirit of places), familiar epithets(the benign divinity), corollaries (the sentimental traveller), and archetypes(the enchanted woods) to impart immediacy and a sense of fullness to herduplex universe.

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134 Colby Library QuarterlyIntense and abiding friendship can be established with places

and, as is befitting deity, may at best develop into outright wor­ship. "I have a feeling as of something like ... a religious riteaccomplished, binding the place and me together." Soberly, sheunderscores the role of creative imagination in this love of lo­calities. The drama exists only for those who have the capacityto will it, who understand and assent. For it is "like art, re­ligions, philosophic systems, and all the things we make to suitour likings." With unfeigned passion she implores the spirit topromulge itself:

Saget, Steine, mir an; 0 sprecht, ihr hohen Paliiste;Strassen, redet ein Wort! Genius, regst du dich nicht?[Tell me, 0 stones; speak, you lofty palaces;Streets, speak a word; Genius, do you not stir?]

But she is woman enough and romantic enough to skirt thepitfalls of consistency. In despite of her sturdy protests, shesublimely repudiates her foremost dogma - "fo,r mercy's sake,not a personification." Before long (page 38) slle tells of nleet­ing a satyric old man "all dyed ·an exquisite bluish verdigrisgreen," and without a tremor designates him "a bronze geniusloci." In the rambling course of five future books she was tomake sundry other adjustments and refinements.

Direct references to the genius loci or its several aliases aremost frequent in The Enchanted Woods (1905). One is apt tofind generalizations about the elusive divinity in the initial andterminal sections, while in between lies an enticement of details.She laments the "stupid wicked carnival sacrilege" which ignoresthe organic habit and reason of places (climate, soil, vegetation,lie of land, history) and makes them "into living creatures,charming friends, or venerable divinities." She decrees the im­personality of the spirit, yet in the next breath conjures it as"a human voice and human eyes . . . personified in kindly livingcreatures." She asserts that "whole districts have meantfriends," and tarries hopefully "at unknown gates in alienplaces" for a glimpse of the fugitive. She concedes that it playsquestionable tricks of recall and identity on dedicated travelers,but assigns it the very human traits of friendliness and humility.In Gascony she concludes that "The Genius Loci of these partsmust be, and is, a human soul."

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Colby Library Quarterly 135In contradistinction, Lee objectifies the presiding spirit of

places as an oread in receptive trees or a naiad in pure berylwater, of necessity "like the great divinities of Olympus ... anintangible idol." To this mythos she prays that it "bestow uponus eyes and hearts such as will recognize thy hidden shrines allover the world." Horror strikes her at the thought of impiety,and she offers "sacrificial and holy tributes." Penitently she ac­cepts the "tiny sample" of reality permitted us - "the enoughutterly denied" - as "one of the small cruelties with which,like every other divinity, he troubles and chastens and makesready the souls of his worshippers."

The Spirit of Rome (1906) has, conversely, precious little tosay about the deity as such. Lee states plainly in the openingpages that she intends to confine herself to the city's physicalcharacter. There are a couple of phrasal curtsies to the geniusloci but no dilate descriptions or discussions. The spirit is inl­plicit here. One derives as one may, with no assist from theauthor. This is less tasking than it might seenl, for these arebrief "left-over" notes and no significant unorthodoxies intrude.

Although new attributes and a new dimension accrue to thegenius in The Sentimental Traveller (1908), of commandingvalue in this book is the account of Vernon Lee's epiphany, her"brief but unforgotten vision of Rome as it existed for otherfolk." When she was a child, her own household moved often("careful to see nothing on the way") but never traveled. It washer good fortune while at Rome in these early years to fall with­in the ken of "enchanting, indomitable, incomparable" Mrs.Mary Singer Sargent, mother of the famous American artist.Lee's meanderings with this "high priestess of them all, the mostfavoured and inspired votary of the Spirit of Localities" openedher eager young eyes to "the spirit immanent in those cupolasand towers and hilly pine-groves." The germination of her life­long ardor took place then and there, grew as she grew, changedas she changed.

In The Sentimental Traveller Lee re-emphasizes the god'stendency to caprice: he refuses his presence, sometimes coyly,assuming odd disguises "when indiscreetly invited to prophesy;"and sOllletimes obstinately, when "scared by elaborate ritual."Not infrequently, as she hinted in The Enchanted Woods, ca-

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136 Colby Library Quarterlyprice can tum to Calvinistic vehemence. The genius exhibitselements of Jehovah's jealous wrath in "smiting and humbling,""delighting to flout self-righteous worshippers." Here, Lee alsodecries the dilettantism of such as Pater, Stevenson and Ruskin,who profane the cult through their eulogies of picturesquesqualor and decay. "The Genius of Places," she declares huffily,"is no immoral divinity." Salient, however, is her extension ofthe genius' function to "reveal our real self to ourselves." Wecarry this ineffable spirit within, "to be brooded over in quietand void." As in all mystic communion, there occur momentsof "aridity," during which we are prone to regard certain well­traveled districts as hackneyed. But this is the fault of "our owneyes and soul, because we see their commonplace side and therubbish of everyday detail which we bring with us." In com­pensation, the power which the genius grants us - of seeingthings in the shape of our hearts' dream - endues drabness withthe stuff of Eden, Arden, and the Hesperides.

Six years later, The Tower of the Mirrors (1914) repeatedthe incommunicable, untranslatable message which the god ofplaces poured into Lee's innermost soul, compounded the in­consistency that the genius was "after all, largely the spirit of aregion's inhabitants," and once nlore endorsed the spirit's abilityto recall similar loved places "like views in opposite mirrors."But no new notions cropped up.

So it is that when Huxley "savoured" The Golden Keys( 1925) the image of genius loci was virtually complete. Allbut the last of these twenty-five essays were written before thewar, struck off in familiar vein as she trod her uncertain cyclearound Italy, England, France, Switzerland and Germany. Af­firmatively, she states what once she had put negatively: thegenius is, of all indwelling gods, the youngest, humblest, mostdecent - "a truly moral godhead." She unfurls another cata­logue of its luminous p'roperties: the philosophy, poetry, musicof a nation; the shape of its buildings; the kindly, gracious,childish habits of its people; the winter boxes for birds; thewheels for storks; the be-ribboned Christmas trees; the greengarlands over church doors; the dionysiac bunches of grapes onsanctified statues. And she rejoices over its evocative pro­pensities.

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Colby Library Quarterly 137The one innovation here is the genius' capacity to nlaterialize

indoors. Never before had Lee vibrated to the spirit's presencewithin four walls and a ceiling. At Schloss Wolframsdorf sheperceived it within the very chamber she occupied. It emergedwithout warning from the simulated porphyry, the sconces, thecameo-like reliefs, the fading nlignonette. She knew now, oncefor all, that the genius never was nor ever could be a "stage­property" of hers; it could not be induced, only found. To pro­duce it at will was to indulge in "sentimental hanky-panky."

In the last sad chapter, Lee mourns the war's devastation ofthe genius cult. "Sacked, burnt, defiled ten thousand times overby millions of indignant wills and by imaginations thirsty forreprisals," the spiritual as well as material aspects of places arebeyond revival. "The plough and the salt of oblivion" havetransfigured them irrevocably. But her god died hard. In theunpublished A Vernon Lee Notebook one finds an essay en­titled "Genius Loci in North Oxford," dated June 29, 1930.The quondam spell of Assisi and Siena is resuscitated, and itbecomes clear that the elf in her breast never really expired.

Miss Irene Cooper Willis, associate and executrix of VernonLee, captures her aptitude in a single dictum. "She had aChinese Eye, and a Chinese power of drawing sustenance fromwhat is beautiful." Miss Willis professes that "To go a walkwith Vernon Lee, to climb with her the quarry valleys, thic-kwith myrtle scrub, near ller Florentine home, to visit some vil­lage church or old villa, was to be admitted into her rapt en­joyment and to feel how vital - as vital as air - to her were[these] inlpressions." Concomitantly, to see her in this moodwas to realize that "The places she visited were nl0re to her thanwere her friends."7

Aldous Huxley never ventured so far afield in search of agenius. Travel he did, long and often, but out of the landscapeleap'ed no such sprite as Lee envisioned. Partial explanation ofthis truancy lies in Huxley's fundamental skepticism, part in hisconcentration on people and their activities, and part may beinferred from his "Wordsworth in the Tropics" thenle. He couldbelieve in "the stimulatingly inhuman strangeness of Nature,"in its "endless varieties of impersonal mysteriousness," but these

7 Vernon Lee's Letters (Privately printed, London: 1937), xiii-xiv.

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138 Colby Library Quarterlycould too easily "lose all their exciting and disturbing quality"and "become as flatly familiar as a page from a textbook ofmetaphysics or theology." In Along the Road (1925) he wrylydecides that "People travel for the sanle reason as they collectworks of art: because the best people do it. To have been tocertain spots on the earth's surface is socially correct; and hav­ing been there, one is superior to those who have not." Howdistressingly removed from the amours de voyage of Lee's senti­mental traveler through enchanted woods.

In "One and Many," Huxley's two unequivocal statements­"men make gods in their own likeness" and "truth is internal"- seem to bring him into accord with Lee's major premise.He did, in fact, espy mythology of a sort in travel, but it is nota matter of desire and dryads. The myths he adduces are thefalse trappings of glamor which envelop places "it is sociallysmart to have visited." The paltry object of these fables: tobring in "several hundred milliards of good money." A reliantcult operates here too, but it is animated by a solitary code­snobisme.

In their disdain of guide books, Huxley and Lee are COiID­

patiblyacidic. Baron Baedeker receives short shrift from either.But on the subject of motorcars they part ways. Lee lashes atthat "improbable mode of locomotion" for its distortion of thesense of topography, the moral pusillanimity and the sacrilegeinvolved in using one for sightseeing. Although Huxley allowsthat "car-owning may have the worst effect on character," heis so steeped in admiration of a motorcar's maneuverability thathe does not mind missing the daemon of the place as he rollssmoothly and comfortably over it.

To keep him company on his travels, Huxley begets severalclever accessories, mostly corpolreal counterparts to Lee's fan­cies. He displays the makings of a superb mystique but not theinclination to ronlanticize. His "born traveller" is so absorbedby real things that "he does not find it necessary to believe infables." But not unlike Lee's "sentimental traveller," he too"takes pleasure in every manifestation of beauty." Upon therelative meanings of real and beauty depends the essential sim­ilarity or disparity of the two travelers. Both, you see, travelfor traveling's sake.

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Colby Library Quarterly 139Vernon Lee might have admitted Huxley's "wander-birds" to

her Shangri-La. These sun-browned Tyrolese youths walkedwith energy and hardiness across the Alps., slept in barns andalong roadsides. They struck him as an elite breed, and hegravely doffed his hat to them.

Huxley's "traveller's-eye view" could not have failed to elicitfavorable response from his senior. The traveler starts with twoadvantages: curiosity and ignorance. Observing, he learns;learning, he conceives. Between knowledge and inference, themystery dissolves, the secret is unshrouded.

Certainly the most (if a pun may be pardoned) spectacularof Huxley's techniques to exorcise the genius loci is his employ­ment of green spectacles. Longing for beauty and delight in adour landscape, Huxley dons a pair of properly tinted glasses."The effect is magical. Every blade of dusty grass becomes onthe instant rich with juicy life. Whatever greenness lurks in thegrey of the olive trees shines out, intensified. The dried-upwoods reburgeon. . . . From imbecile, the sea turns siren, andthe arid hills ... break into verdure." Thus he could "temperthe illumination of the world" to his own whinl without invest­ing it with pixies. What Lee accomplishes only through diligentexertion of her mythopoeic faculties, Huxley effects by merelycalling on his optometrist.

Huxley has neither the capacity nor the patience for sus­tained rhapsody. His delineations of landscape approximate thecomeliness of Lee's until they run foul of a shock in imagery, astark metaphor or an incongruous analogue. Huxley does notshy away from the soilure of time or civilization. He is not un­happy in "the pleasing confusion of untempered reality," andhis modernity welcomes "the contest between industrialism andthe natural beauties of the earth." The baroque interior of aGonzaga palace awakes in him no glorious phantasm like Lee'sgenius at Schloss Wolframsdorf, only a conventional "ghost ofdeparted plenitude." He saw the Cartesian landscape of NorthHolland as a matrix of geometric - not geomythic - figures.At Bologna, where Lee was all eyes for the surrounding won­der of sky and mountain, Huxley succumbed to the courtesy,inquisitiveness and cordial mendacity of the natives, perused hisbeloved Britannica, dabbled in anecdote and biography, pon-

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Colby Quarterly, Vol. 5, Iss. 6 [1960], Art. 6

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol5/iss6/6

140 Colby Library Quarterlydered the function of the artist, and took photos. Vernon Leeabhorred Kodak.

The measure of variance between Lee and Huxley ashierophants of travel may be gauged in these representativeepithets: Lee wrote votively about "the sacred fury of travel,"and frowned behind rose-colo'red glasses; Huxley called hisbarbless sin "the vice of travel," and winked behind greengoggles.

Vemon Lee Collection: This veritable mountain of books,letters, manuscripts (published and unp'ublished), photographs,first appearances in newspapers and periodicals, and miscella­neous memorabilia was allotted to Colby College Library byMiss Willis in two large lots. The November 1952 issue ofCOLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY was entirely devoted to descrip­tions of this accumulation, containing articles on "The VernonLee Papers," "Who Was Vernon Lee?" "An Interim Bibliog­raphy of Vernon Lee," "A List of Those Who Wrote Lettersto Vernon Lee," "Mr. [H. G.l Wells and Vernon Lee," "Let­ters From Gosse and Benson."

CLQ for February 1953 has "Letters From Edith Whartonto Vernon Lee;" November 1953, "To My Friend, Karl Hille­brand;" February 1954, "A Letter From Mrs. Humphry Wardto Vernon Lee;" May 1954, two articles on Ariadne inMantua;" August 1954, "Letters From Paul Bourget to VernonLee."

A limited number of copies of these issues are available onrequest.

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Cary: Aldous Huxley, Vernon Lee and the Genius Loci

Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1960